Helping put the 'Master' in WebMaster

If you have a website then you know that getting traffic is an important thing to achieve. However, no matter how much or little traffic you get on a daily basis you should try to utilize this short time you have, to optimize their visitation.

1. First off you want to decrease the amount of times people visit and immediately leave.  To achieve this you want to make sure you catch their attention no matter which page they visit first, especially the front page any way you can.

2. Most people do not like to waste their time, making people have to search through your site to find something is not a good thing, make sure the important things are easy to find.

3. Make sure your website width is scaled properly, you want your website to fit well in at least 1024×768 screen resolution so that it is not too big and people wont have to scroll left to right. Although this may not sound like a big deal it also makes your website look more professional no matter who visits.

4. Ensure that your website works properly on all browsers, not all people use the same browser so although you may have programmed it in one does not mean it will look or act the same in another, they are usually minor differences but better to be safe.

5. What someone sees right when they get to your website is important make sure you dont have too big a banner or logo or anything else that makes it hard to see what your website really has to offer.

6. Try and utilize their visit by making ways to get a return visit such as having an easy to use mailing list they can sign up for and turn their one time visit into a reoccurring one.

7. If you have a specific goal in mind you want from your visitors, such as clicking on your Ad’s, or downloading your E-book, try to separate it in some way with an outline or however you can to make it visible and stand out from the rest of your website.

8. Don’t waste your precious website space with useless animated GIF’s or things that have no purpose or usefulness on your website, if you want to make your website look good, the simpler the better.

These may seem too simple to be effective, but no matter how little traffic you receive any little optimization you can use for your website can help.

HTML is the basic web design language, standing for HyperText Markup Language.  In its basic form it is comprised of merely tags.  Tags design the web page and can manipulate the text within it.  HTML tags all use the same style “<tag>”, where the command is surrounded by a less than “<” and greater than “>” sign.  To demonstrate HTML web design I will use the “<b>” bold tag as an example.  To make a word bold you need to surrounded the words or letters you want bold with the “<b>” bold tag and its ending tag “</b>”.  All ending tags have the same style using the backslash before the command in the tag.

<b>Bold text</b> and not bold text.

HTML result:

Bold text and not bold text.

Anything inbetween the starting tag and ending tag will be modified appropriately.

Something to note, not all tags have an ending tag.  A tag that can operate independently does not require an ending tag.  Such a tag is the “<br>” break tag, which will skip the current line and start a new one.

This is one line <br> and this is a second line.

HTML result:

This is one line
and this is a second line.

Now to test out your HTML web design skills you just have to pull out your favorite text editor such as notepad and insert the code then saving it as a .html file and open it in your favorite browser such as Firefox or Internet Explorer.  To explore HTML and web design further it is a good idea to learn all the tags available, you can start here.